I am a huge fan of Fresh Air. I listen to every episode. I greatly admire your interviewing skill and your obvious in-depth preparation for every interview.

Having said that, I was extremely disappointed by your interview with Lawrence Wright. I realize that you are not a hard-hitting investigative reporter and that’s not the kind of show Fresh Air is. I realize that your guests are invited onto the show with the intention of portraying them in a favorable light. In all the time I’ve been listening, I’ve never heard you shred a guest, nor would I expect to. But the other side of that coin is that if that’s the kind of show you do, then you’d better be pretty darn discriminating in who you invite, and Wright, despite his self-professed expertise and alleged objectivity, doesn’t cut it.

His reporting on the Middle East conflict, like the supposed facts (many of which are anything but) that he rattled off on your show, are obviously slanted against Israel. It is beyond me how anyone can claim to be an expert on Israel, which he professes himself to be, who so thoroughly and completely butchers the pronunciation of an Israeli town he claimed to have visited which plays a critical role in the current conflict (“seh-de-rat”? Really? Oh, my God!), as well as the name of one of the biggest daily newspapers in the country (ha-AH-retz, not ha-ah-RETZ).

On the subject of facts, just one example of an outright falsehood… Wright claimed that Hamas stopped firing rockets into Israel during the “truce.” In fact, rockets from Gaza continued to rain down on Gaza throughout the “truce.”

He also criticized Israel for not honoring the “spirit of the truce” by withholding the blockade, but did not bother to mention that Israel never asked for or agreed to the truce and said when Hamas first announced it that the only reason they were agreeing to a “truce” is because Israel had destroyed much of their terrorist infrastructure and they were going to use the “truce” to rebuild it. This is, in fact, exactly what they did, and for Israel to have eased the blockade when they new full well that any dual-purpose supplies brought into Gaza were going to be used to rebuild the terrorist infrastructure would have been simply stupid.

I cannot fail to mention Wright’s profoundly stupid comment at the end of the interview that a great step toward peace would be for Hamas to release Gilad Shalit unconditionally. He’s a clue for you and Wright: Hamas doesn’t WANT peace. There has never been any sign, not even a little one, at any time, that Hamas is interested in anything but the destruction of Israel. Why, then, should they make a peace gesture such as the absurd one he suggested?

Really, Terry, if you’re going to stick with the NPR trend of news coverage that is decidedly biased against Israel, then the least you could do is interview someone with a better claim to expertise and slightly more respect for truth than Wright.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

Learn from Israel

Monday, January 11, 2010

The Israelis do not use racial profiling for airport security (“European response mixed to new U.S. security demands,” Jan. 4). They use profiling, which includes patterns of behavior, coordination of intelligence and sophisticated modeling of which country of origin as but one factor. Interviews at the airport are by trained army personnel and they are watching and listening to everyone, even Florida snowbirds. They are just doing it right.

A member of Capuano’s staff responded in an email message which read as follows:

Congressman Capuano has referred your email message to me. You ask why he did not sign the CJP ad in the Globe and Herald. As I recall, we had a rather short time to review the text and no opportunity to contribute to its drafting.

I hope you know that he did vote, that same week, in favor of H. Res. 921, in defense of Israel’s right, as a sovereign democratic state, to take appropriate action to defend itself. He also wrote a letter of support, which I attach and which was posted on JCRC website.

Please feel free to call if you have further questions.

I am not terribly impressed with the claim that there wasn’t enough time for Capuano to review the text.  There was enough time for every other member of the Massachusetts delegation to review it and decide to sign.

Furthermore, I cannot at this time find Capuano’s letter posted on the JCRC Web site, although I did find a reference to it in minutes of a JCRC Board meeting.  Also, in the letter that Capuano wrote, he does not actually state explicitly that he supports Israel’s right to defend itself.  His letter, dated July 16, 2006, reads:

Dear Friends,

I regret that I cannot be present at your rally in support of Israel and peace.  I honored the vision and courage of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon when, last year, he withdrew Israeli settlers from Gaza.  I admired, too, the wisdom and courage of Prime Minister Ehud Barak when he withdrew Israeli troops from south Lebanon.  I share your outrage and your anguish that terrorists, seeking to make a mockery of those brave actions, have attacked Israel from the very lands it relinquished in search of peace.

I mourn with you the loss of life among all the suffering peoples of the region.  I have long believed that only the United States exercises, or could exercise, sufficient influence in the region to broker a lasting peace.  I share with you a profound desire to see Israel living in peace with its neighbors, and I, with other Members of Congress, will be urging the President and the Secretary of State to work to that end.

This letter goes to great lengths to avoid taking a position in support of Israel’s right to self-defense.  It trivializes attacks against Israel by claiming that their motive is “to make a mockery” of Israeli efforts to achieve peace, rather than their real motive, which is to destroy Israel.  It draws a noxious moral equivalency between the suffering of Israelis from terror attacks and the suffering of Palestinians from Israel’s efforts to defend itself.  I could go on, but you get the point.

Aside from all this a letter posted on a Web site is far, far less prominent than a full-page ad published in both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald.

I am at a loss to explain why someone who appears to have gone to great lengths to avoid taking a public stand in favor of Israel’s right to self-defense, would then vote in favor of H. Res. 921, which does exactly that in rather strong terms.  My best guess is that, again, a vote in favor of a House Resolution is far less prominent than a full-page ad in the two biggest Boston newspapers.

It seems that Capuano is willing to support Israel’s right to self-defense only if he doesn’t have to be terribly public about it.

To whom it may concern:

I just heard on the BBC News Hour, broadcast on the NPR station WBUR of Boston, an outrageously one-sided story about Hamas and the blockade of Gaza.

A UN official, an Israeli teacher and an Hamas official were interviewed on the air calling for the blockade to be lifted.  It is unclear why the BBC felt that an Israeli school teacher qualifies as an expect on the Arab-Israeli conflict whose opinion is worthy of broadcast.  It is unfathomable why the BBC would think it appropriate to broadcast a story about the blockade without interviewing a single person who supports it.

The Hamas official you interviewed claimed that Israel is trying to impose “surrender” on the Palestinians.  Your story offered no opposing point of view.  Hamas refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and its stated raison d’etre, which its leadership has affirmed quite recently, is to destroy Israel and kill as many “Zionists” as possible in the process.  It would seem Hamas, not Israel, is trying to impose “surrender”; why did your story say nothing of this?

The UN official you interviewed blamed the suffering in Gaza on Isarel and said that it was “completely predictable” that the blockade would cause such suffering.  The other interviewees also blamed Israel.  Wouldn’t it perhaps have made sense to at least mention in passing, let alone cover in an interview, the point of view held by many civilized people all over the world, not just by Israel, that the suffering is Hamas’s fault, that if Hamas would denounce its quest to destroy Israel and stop sending bombs and suicide bombers, Gaza and the entire Middle East would benefit as a result?

As described by CAMERA, the supposed “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza was manufactured by Hamas for the purpose of drumming up support.  Wouldn’t it have made sense to mention this?

Your reporter mentioned in passing that he had to switch passports on the way to Damascus, because travelers with Israeli visas in their passports are not allowed to enter Syria.  Wouldn’t it perhaps have made sense to at least mention in passing that this because Syria, too, refuses to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, and has officially been in a state of war with Israel for the last sixty years?  Wouldn’t it perhaps have made sense to at least mention that the reason why your reporter was traveling to Syria to speak with a Hamas official, is because Hamas is not in fact a Palestinian movement, but is rather a movement of terrorists born, bred and trained in Israel with the express purpose of destroying Israel?

Wouldn’t it perhaps have made sense to mention that in the last election, the Palestinians had the opportunity to choose between leaders who were trying to make peace with Israel, and leaders whose avowed purpose is to destroy Israel, and they chose the latter?  Who, then, but them, is to blame for their suffering?

Wouldn’t it perhaps have made sense to mention that when Israel loosens the border restrictions on Gaza, the inevitable result is increased incursions into Israel and attacks by Hamas terrorists?

Wouldn’t it perhaps have made sense to mention that when the border between Gaza and Egypt was breached, Hamas operatives were seen transporting weapons and supplies for manufacturing explosives in large quantities from Egypt into Gaza?  Do your reporters think they are going to use all that ammonium nitrate to fertilize their crops?

The Hamas official you interviewed openly threatened to escalate the violence in the coming weeks and months if the “siege” of Gaza is not lifted.  Your story left this remark unchallenged.  In other words, you allowed a Hamas official to openly threaten terrorism without saying a word about it.  When the IRA was bombing buildings in London, did the BBC allow IRA spokesmen to threaten escalations of the violence on the air without challenging them?

Wouldn’t it perhaps have made sense to mention that not only Israel, but also the US, the European Union, Canada, Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom classify Hamas as a terrorist organization, and that the Israeli policy of refusing to negotiate with terrorist organizations is supported by much of the world?

The story I heard this morning on the BBC was essentially Hamas propaganda, not the objective, balanced, fact-based reporting one might expect from an organization like the BBC.  Or, at least, the reporting one might expect if one did not already know that the BBC has a long, shameful history of bias against Israel in its reporting of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Jonathan Kamens

To: worldservice@bbc.co.uk
Cc: letters@camera.org, kklose@npr.org, info@wbur.bu.edu

One more thing I forgot to mention:

It would have made sense to mention, when reporting Hamas’s call for a ceasefire, that there is a long, clear historical record of Hamas using ceasefires not as an opportunity to make progress toward peace, but rather as an opportunity to regroup, retrain and rearm its operatives, after which it engages in some sort of provocation which forces Israel to respond, then claims that Israel broke the ceasefire and resumes its attacks, stronger than it was before.  In other words, for Hamas, calls for ceasefire are a military tactic.  This fact would have been reported in an objective news story.

Jonathan Kamens